Learned Worthlessness

Girls are faced with Hollywood, photoshopped images, magazines, films, all of which pressure them about how they should look, giving them a basis of what women should be in this world.

Girls abuse themselves because they can't meet these standards.They're peer-pressured, socially pressured.

And then there's the girls of my world. We don't need the media or models or the world to tell us how worthless we are or how we don't meet standards when we get it from the one place that's supposed to be a safe place. The one place where we're supposed to learn unconditional love and forgiveness, we learn, instead, worthlessness.

I learned to hate myself in church.

I wasn't raised in an extreme fundamentalist world. I was taught about modesty, forced to give up my shorts once I hit puberty, and never wear clothing that showed off too much of my girlish body. But it wasn't as bad as the pressure on other girls. I had pretty dresses and plenty of jeans and tshirts. I was told I was pretty by my parents.

The trouble was from church, the one place where grace is the message above all messages. Grace! You can have grace! God gives you grace! He loves you even when you don't deserve love! Grace is the ever popular topic. I heard it all, I sang Amazing Grace along with the best of them.

The message that stuck with me, though, wasn't one about safety or grace or forgiveness. It was about me failing. Again. I remember hearing since I was little about how worthless we are without God, how we are as lowly worms in comparison to God's goodness, and without Him, we cannot hope to gain eternal life. It's a message of good news, isn't it? To hear that you can be raised, to be given grace and love from God? 

But what I heard was the constant berating..."You are worthless without God." "You have to humble yourself to be lifted up by God. And to humble yourself means putting all others before yourself. Anything less, and you're failing." And every time I mess up in life, I remember those words: "You are small compared to God. You are worthless without Him. You are but a mere human, and you failed *again*."

I live in a world where girls are expected to be pretty, sweet, skinny, and sexy...but I also live in a Christian world where I am expected to be godly and perfect as well. I am to be a light in this world, and all eyes are on me when I mess up. When I was human and made bad choices, I didn't just mess up. I let Christianity down, I made Christ look bad. I failed. I was worthless.

Churches will get their feathers ruffled up and glare at me in their godly anger, saying that I'm missing their point. Their point of how this worthlessness only exemplifies God's goodness! That it's because of His goodness that we can live our lives for Him.

It doesn't matter. As a girl already feeling uncomfortable in her skin, with the added pressure to be pure, modest, and never a stumbling block to boys, all I heard was the message that I was worthless...I wasn't worthy of love. It didn't matter that I was also told that I don't need to work for God's grace. Every time I messed up, I was reminded of my worthless state and I needed to try harder. The church says I don't need to work for my grace, but their eyes on my every move and their harsh disappointment tells me otherwise. The church took me as a naive, little girl, told me I was worthless, and as soon as it was ingrained in me, they tried to tell me my worthlessness can be taken away. The irony. The church taught me to hate myself and now judge me for doing so.

The pressure is on us girls to be perfect and without blemish. It's the kind of pressure that is on girls all over the world. The world teaches us to hate ourselves in the name of beauty. The church teaches us to hate ourselves in the name of grace.

Girls all over the world look in the mirror and say, "I can never be pretty enough. I'm worthless."

I look in the mirror and I say, "I can never be godly enough. I am worthless."

Only Human

I covered it's been hard for me to embrace who I really am. In fact, I think I should admit that I still have no bloody idea who I am exactly. I'm attempting to discover myself, the person, the girl I am deep underneath the layers and layers of nature and nurturing I've acquired over the years of my life. Asking the questions, 

"Is this really me? Or is it a remnant of who they wanted me to be?" 

"Do I really think like this, or is this left-over from the fake me?" 

"What *is* my style?" 

"What do I think genuinely about this?" 

I find myself wondering who the hell I really am. I attempt to extend myself grace as I learn the little things about myself. I attempt (and fail) to love myself. As I ask these questions, however, I sometimes forget that this self-discovery is just not that: self-discovery. It is more. It is the discovery of who I am to the world as well. It is the discovery of who I am to other people while finding myself.

Am I the girl who loves herself only to forget to extend that love to others? Or does it make me more susceptible to extend grace and love? I find myself struggling to take in grace and to give it.

I am harsh with myself, loathing of all the negative qualities that seem to consume my life. But not

only that but I am also not as giving as I could be when it comes to others and the negativity I face 

from them. 

I think of my best friend and the qualities about her very self that tend to rub me the wrong way. There's nothing wrong persay with what she does, but it annoys me and as a result I look at these actions as offensive, my sensitive mind glaring at her because she's late and I'm early, she's stubborn in the moments

where I am not and I am stubborn where she is not. You'd think we balance each other out quite nicely, and we do. Normally I just smile and roll my eyes because we are best friends and that's just what best friends do. We irritate each other. 

However there are the days where I am just not easily amused and want to speak harshly.

And while I don't, because I'd feel much too guilty to say anything, I do tend to lock these feelings up inside, harboring them. What good is there in harboring feelings? When, one day, I was faced with a sudden realization that I was the one being completely unreasonable and selfish in my expectations of those who surround me in life. 

I was reading John Green's Paper Towns. And a friend of the main character says to him: 

“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it's going with my girlfriend - but I don't give a shit, man, because you're you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that's okay. They're them. I'm too obsessed with a reference website to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That's okay, too. That's me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.” 

This is my problem. I keep expecting people to not be themselves.

How can I expect the world to accept me, the real me when I am unable to accept others for who they are? 

Real acceptance isn't about embracing the likable parts. It isn't about accepting the bits we like about each other. It is about accepting each other as wholes. Not a part of me, not a part of you, not halves, not pieces: all of each other. Taking the good with the bad, extending grace to one another for the screw-ups, showing forgiveness for the hurts, acting kindness for the mistakes, and above all being loving through the moments when we least feel like it. 

I have written on my hand, "Only Human", because I am that obnoxious girl who writes on her hands.

But also because it is the reminder I needed this week. The reminder that I am only human not only as I struggle to find and understand myself, but also as I learn to grow and live with those around me. I want to remember that not only am I human, but so is the rest of the world. I do not live in a bubble, I do not live alone, nor do I want to be alone. And because of this fact, I want to remember that those around me?
They are only human too.